The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the inventors hereof, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted to be prior art against the present disclosure.
Multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) transmission can be adopted in a wireless local area network. By using multiple transmit and receive antennas to transmit data symbols, MIMO multiplies the capacity of a radio link to exploit multipath propagation. MIMO has become an essential element of wireless communication standards including IEEE 802.11n (Wi-Fi), IEEE 802.11ac (Wi-Fi), HSPA+ (3G), WiMAX (4G), and Long Term Evolution (4G).
In a MIMO system, an encoding scheme such as the space-time block code (STBC) can be used to transmit multiple copies of a data stream across the multiple antennas at the transmitter. For example, an STBC can take a form similar to a matrix having data entries of data symbols. A same data symbol can occupy multiple data entries in an STBC matrix such that the same data symbol can be received in various versions to improve the reliability of data transfer.